^∞Fouroboros

Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.

Warren Spahn: 1921-2003

363-245; 3.09 ERA

Hall of Fame: #6 all-time winning pitcher

1943 - Bronze Star, Purple Heart

1957 - Cy Young Award

2003 so far: Bill Mauldin, Joe Foss, Robert Palmer, John Ritter, Johnny Paycheck, Pat Moynihan, Robert Stack, George Plimpton, Jack Elam, Neil Postman, Katherine Hepburn, Barry White, David Brinkley, Bobby Hatfield, Gregory Peck, Briggs Cunningham, Charles Bronson, Buddy's Hackett and Ebsen, Carol Shields, Benny Carter, Bob Hope, Warren Zevon, Hume Cronyn, Johhny Cash, Elia Kazan, Art Carney. Noted with ambivialence: Lester Maddox, Edward Teller, Strom Thurmond, Leni Reifenstahl.

Sigh. I'm sure every generation goes through this, but it seems like the constellation of people, notable adults I guess, who I became aware of as a kid growing up is starting to blink out.

It's strange. Pat Moynihan was not as startling as Gregory Peck, yet they were about the same age. Robert Palmer shocked me. Same for John Ritter and Barry White. Warren Zevon was simple sadness, grief already in process. Bob Hope, well, that was no surprise but Buddy's Hackett and Ebsen--I wasn't ready for them. Katherine Hepburn, Johnny Cash and Art Carney just seemed "unfair." I'll miss Neil Postman more than George Plimpton. What's up with that? Edward Teller, Thurmond, Maddox and Reifenstahl: Thanks for the history lesson, now we know what not to do.

This is the first year that these passings have really caught my eye. Okay, maybe the second. Most of the people I listed--maybe a third from memory, the rest from here--are twice my age, yet they seem to have imprinted pretty firmly on my flimsy brain. The Honeymooners and The Beverly Hillbillies I saw in reruns. All were obviously seen from a distance through the tube or schoolbooks or newspapers. Or albums or radio. But the strongest feeling of all I would say is reserved for a weird spread. Palmer and Peck were the most profoundly sad for me. Still working on that one. I was surprised that Ritter was more saddening than Katherine Hepburn, and that Jack Elam more so than Robert Stack. Pat Moynihan makes me sadder than Charles Bronson. Because, well, there's just no way Charles Bronson is dead. Period.

Walmart: Who let the dogs out?

Well, it seems the LA Times has gone and done a 3-part series on those folks with the Smiley Face and the 55-gallon drums of peanut butter. They're going deeper into the beast and offering up some very nice detail on what a five cent cheaper pair of sweat socks costs or gains you exactly, in the aggregate. Worth checking out: Part 1, Yesterday. Part 2, Today. Here.

[ed: my bad. someone pointed out to me you have to register for the LAT link. hey it's a good paper and it is free. apologies. thanks to makeet]

So, the question is if you can get a gallon of milk in Las Vegas for:

$1.95 - Walmart
$3.04 - Albertsons
$3.25 - Vons

(Put the smaller grocers and bodegas who may sell you one at, ohh, maybe $3.50.)

And, a brand-identical, 9-item grocery bag (milk, cereal, Coke, bread, lettuce, carrots, hotdogs, coffee, shampoo) that the LA Times filled from the above Walmart, Albertsons and Vons, rounded out respectively, to:

$17.70 - Walmart
$23.74 - Albertsons
$25.41 - Vons

So the question is: Do the other smaller, less price-efficient players deserve to live?

All depends on your metric doesn't it? The current divisive management/labor impasse in California over health benefits is due in part to the competitive squeeze and resulting operating cost pressures from Walmart's heavy entry into grocery. Guess who's losing the most revenue? Albertons and Vons. That's 100,000 or so employees being told they can't have more subsidized health benefits like those you and I may enjoy from our companies. Lucky us, huh?

Now, do you work in: Auto parts, Hardware, Dry Cleaning, Flowers, Baking, Toys and Games, Business Supplies, Optometry, Musical Instruments, Furniture? Do you work? Yes? Well, chances are changes are a-comin'.

That $1.10-$1.29 price differential on a gallon of milk, is so large as to be unclosable. And that's the point: unassailable price advantage. That's the stuff which has often been the fuel of market capture. Early to market innovation, new category creation make up the other primary choices.

And, between Price, Product Improvement, or Pure Innovation, two of those approaches expand options and diversify markets. One doesn't. Improvement or innovation create new choices and often completely new customers or industries and, therefore, markets. But Price Contraction, as a source of competitive advantage is a lose/lose long term strategy viewed one way and a win/lose strategy posed another way. And if lose is in any of those definitions of "competitive advantage" you've broken the rules of real Sustainable competitive advantage: Everybody must win.

Win/lose short-medium term

Win/Lose means your muscle allows you to look at the floor with regard to price - $0.00. That's in the abstract, but it just so happens your "real" floor is several basements down relative to your competitors. The Win/Lose part of this is that the more you wheedle down operating costs to mind pennies, those cuts fall to operational areas like training people or, rather, committed, competent people. In all but rare cases, salary is perhaps our largest non-rotating, non-returning operational cost. The cost of goods is returned by sales, your cost of salary, goes out the door. Good, interested, competitive people cost money. They know it and they go elsewhere if you don't have money to pay them. The paradox is, those "good" people have money you need them to spend, but if you expect them to suffer through your underpaid, under-knowledged employees' disinterest in order to transact with your business, well, you know the answer to that one.

Lose/Lose long term

For the long term, Lose/Lose part of the proposition, by pruning away or acquiring your way to virtual retail dominance, you essentially destroy large parts of your local employment and diverse retail base and it's income generating capacity. you will have met your goal of creating an insurmountable barrier to entry to all but the most novel of upstarts. Banks will not loan to smaller players where you operate due to the operational squash-power your company has over start-ups. But still, given your operating cost focus, more competent (and therefore, costly) knowledge has been driven out of your market and been replaced by you, a low price, low product expertise player. Again, competence generates nmore cashflow and disposable income. Income you need. The Lose/Lose part of this conundrum is, to get where you've gotten, you are no longer considered a positive economic force, nor a good neighbor: your markets are captive and possibly resentful of the lack of choice you've dictated; your local tax-base has lost it's diversity and thus its stability. Customers will bolt the first chance they get, the Chamber of Ex-Commerce resents you, and politicians will not like the quandary your business model has put the community in as angry voters ask them how they "let things get this way." You'll be big. And probably alone.

Fun. The price model means you have to gobble up more strategic geography and ever-increasing tactical business channels. And there's always a wall, so to speak. For Walmart, for 10 years of exponential growth, things have been peachy. Stock analysts have been wooed and wowed, customers have saved money, and politicians have welcomed them with relatively unflinching open arms. And just as everyone thought the internet bubble had reversed the laws of economic gravity, Walmart enjoyed a honeymoon of shortsightedness all around.

But notice: Contraction is the key word in so much of whats being said about them, positive or negative. America is an expansionist culture and a divergent, not a convergent economy. New product, not lower prices as it's first imperative. If the price of doing business means that brands and their companies and their employees must bend to the cultural and operational imperatives of Walmart, where does that leave a nation that invented James Dean or Apple or Coke?

In my opinion,

Sam's America!®

is a non-starter. Walmarts "great unravelling" has begun.

<Old technology never dies, it just fades away. Into cool rubble.

I photograph modern ruins because I find it disturbing to find familiar objects and technology to be abandoned. I'm reminded that nothing is permanent, that everything is always in a state of transition. And we see ourselves in our own transitions, sometimes too focused on where we're going to notice and appreciate where we are.

--Phillip Buehler

Or, where we've been

Modern Ruins is the site of photographer Phillip Buehler. I share his fascination with old tech left to rot, with the elephant's graveyards of progress. If you went to the 1964 New York World's Fair (as Buehler had as a kid), you'll find its old and current state portrayed here. Ditto, Ellis Island, Coney Island, old NASA launch sites, factories, aircraft graveyards etc.

Any fans of James Burke's Connections series (The original 10-parter is the ONLY one to watch) will remember the episode Countdown. As a prologue to the next and final episode, it ends with a poignant tour of the old Apollo launch site. Besides the then uncommon use of Carmina Burina as a sound bed (it was made in 1978), the writer walks through all the blow-torched and scrapped gantrys and left overs from that prodigious, exciting time as he asks an interesting question.

To paraphrase, Once the excitement of new ventures like the space program--or any venture, for that matter--winds down, what happens to the knowledge and lessons of what we've passed through and achieved?

I loved that question when I heard it as a 16-year old and it's been a driver for me ever since. Does a culture and a system where obsolescence is accelerated by a stuctural, economic neccessity for "new and improved" leave us with a gap in our cultural memory? Does this willful gap cause us to miss ideas and opportunities that are latent or right under our nose? Do we get unnecessarily spooked into reactive and possibly destrucutive gestures when the "old" is presented as new and threatening? Perhaps the cult of the new ignores the contributions of the past, to all our detriment.

Imagine the foreshortened way we regard events today. The Walmart question, discussed elsewhere on this site, seems for many a New problem. Yet, anyone with a historical memory recalls a collossus like once-great Sears dwarfing it's next 5 competitiors combined. Or an A&P, similarly huge and scary, now an also ran. Or, take the challenges of war or political candidacies: each event or individual tracks remarkably with situations or people of the past, yet we're shocked, shocked when we "find there's gambling going on here."

Things like media coverage of Iraq or Michael Jackson or Laci Peterson or Elizabeth Smart cause seemingly well-informed people to shake their heads and lament the decline of culure or modern media. The only problem is, this conclusion ignores the fact of say, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, or The Lindbergh Trial, or the Donner Party or whatever. The latter, about national security, kidnapping and death of an infant, and mass cannibalism and family tragedy were media supernova of their time. Papers couldn't print updates fast enough and people could speak of nothing else. Speculation and presumptions of guilt or innocence ran rampant. People spoke out of the top of their hats just to be saying something. Jibber-jabber. Just like, oh, I dunno NYT, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, Rush/Talk-Radio et al do today.

Non-warranteed certitude is not a new product. That's just the way people are. Stories, archetypal stories, engage the mind like no other. Their mythical character and plot make them appeal to huge segments of people, but their conclusions and lessons can vary wildly in some cases because each is treated as a new lesson, not a repeat and an enhancement. And in this kind of a-historical context, we struggle wildy for meaning and understanding.

The result?

"I abolutely, positively have an opinion on this, that or the other. Just don't ask me 'why'"?

As Phillip sagely notes above, we're sometimes too focused on where we're going to notice and appreciate where we are. Indeed. Or, how we got here.

[1-25-05 updated]

Yeah, but did they remove the "E"s and "R"s from the palace computer keyboards...

The Sunday Mirror, Nov 23, 2003:

Queen's fury as Bush goons wreck garden
Exclusive By Terry O'Hanlon

THE Queen is furious with President George W. Bush after his state visit caused thousands of pounds of damage to her gardens at Buckingham Palace....

Royal officials are now in touch with the Queen's insurers and Prime Minister Tony Blair to find out who will pick up the massive repair bill. Palace staff said they had never seen the Queen so angry as when she saw how her perfectly-mantained lawns had been churned up after being turned into helipads with three giant H landing markings for the Bush visit.

The rotors of the President's Marine Force One helicopter and two support Black Hawks damaged trees and shrubs that had survived since Queen Victoria's reign....

The historic fabric of the Palace was also damaged as high-tech links were fitted for the US leader and his entourage during his three-day stay with the Queen.

The Outrage Countdown begins... A comparative newslogue:

It's Time to Take Government's Spoiled Brats to the Woodshed
Neal Boortz
Newsmax, Thursday, Jan. 25, 200
LINK

GEORGE BUSH, MEET CAPTAIN QUEEG
LINK

Kansas City Star, May 18, 2001
GSA Exonerates Clinton Staff of Vandalism
LINK

Kansas City Star, June 4, 01
Agency to reopen investigation of alleged White House vandalism
By DAVID GOLDSTEIN
LINK (Ed.: Great timeline of who's tattling on who in this article, scroll down.)

Trash Talk:
Even if Clintonites didn't trash the place, that doesn't change much in my book.
Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online
June 4, 2001 5:05 p.m.
LINK

Bush Aide Details Alleged Clinton Staff Vandalism
List Is Response to Credibility Questions
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 3, 2001
LINK